Preface to Marx-Engels Collected Works Volume (24)

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Volume 24 of the Collected Works of Karl Marx and Frederick Engels covers the period between May 1874 and May 1883.

These years were an important stage in the development of the international working-class movement that began after the Paris Commune of 1871. The Paris Commune enriched the proletariat with the invaluable experience of class struggle, but at the same time demonstrated that the objective and subjective conditions for the transfer of power to the working people were not yet ripe and, above all, that there was a lack of independent mass proletarian parties armed with the theory of scientific socialism and capable of leading the working class in the struggle for the radical transformation of society. After the defeat of the Commune the working class was faced with the task of rallying its forces and preparing for new revolutionary battles, and the need to form proletarian parties in individual countries came to the fore. The period of the spread of Marxism began, a “period ... of the formation, growth and maturing of mass socialist parties with a proletarian class composition” (V.l. Lenin, Collected Works, Vol. 19, Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1980, pp. 295-96).

In the works in this volume Marx and Engels continue their analysis of the historical experience of the International Working Men’s Association and the Paris Commune. They show that, in the new historical conditions, the organisational form of the International no longer corresponded to the aims of the proletariat’s class struggle. Thanks to the International, the understanding of the idea of proletarian internationalism and the unity of the working class’s aims and tasks had risen to a new level. “The social democratic working-men’s parties,” Marx wrote, “organised on more or less national dimensions ... form as many international groups, no longer single sections thinly scattered through different countries and held together by an eccentric General Council, but the working masses themselves in continuous, active, direct intercourse, cemented by exchange of thought, mutual services, and common aspiration” (see this volume, p. 239). Marx and Engels skilfully related the tasks of the workers’ parties in separate countries to the aims of the whole international working-class movement.

The formation of the socialist parties took place at a time of bitter ideological struggle waged by the representatives of the Marxist trend against alien class influences and petty-bourgeois views, fostered by the socially heterogeneous composition of the working class, and against reformist, opportunist and anarchist trends in the working-class movement itself. The fight for ideological unity on the basis of scientific socialism forms the main substance of Marx’s and Engels’ theoretical and practical activities as leaders of the international working-class movement in the period under review.

London, where Marx and Engels were living at that time, was still the ideological centre of the international working-class movement. Prominent figures in the workers’ parties appealed to Marx and Engels, as acknowledged authorities, for help and advice. Their correspondence, their contributions to the workingclass press, the publication of their new and republication of their old works, propagated the ideas of Marxism in the international working-class movement.

The experience of the Paris Commune called for a thoroughgoing elaboration of the problems of the state and revolution, the fundamental propositions of Marxism on the dictatorship of the proletariat and the role of the party, and the problem of what allies the proletariat should have in the fight for the radical transformation of society. Of prime importance was the task of providing an integral and systematic exposition of Marxism, defending its theoretical principles, revealing the universal character of its dialectical method, and teaching revolutionary socialists how to apply the theory creatively, how to work out scientific programmes and tactics for their parties and rebuff the opponents of Marxism.

The present volume includes a considerable number of works written by Marx and Engels specifically for the German proletariat. This was explained by the fact that during the Franco-Prussian war (1870-71) the centre of the European workers’ movement had been shifted from France to Germany (p. 211). As Engels wrote, “the German workers’ position in the van of the European movement rests essentially on their genuinely international attitude during the war” (p. 68). Analysis of the achievements and mistakes of German Social-Democracy enabled Marx and Engels to examine the general problems of the theory and tactics of the whole international working-class movement. Indisputably, the most important of their works on this subject are Marx’s Critique of the Gotha Programme and Engels’ letter to Bebel of March 18-28, 1875, both responses to the draft programme for the Gotha Congress. This congress united the Social-Democratic Workers’ Party of Germany (Eisenachers), the first mass party based on the principles of the First International and led by August Bebel and Wilhelm Liebknecht, and the General Association of German Workers led by followers of Ferdinand Lassalle.

Marx and Engels had maintained that this union should have taken place only if the Lassallean leaders were ready “to abandon their sectarian slogans and their state aid, and to accept in its essentials the Eisenach Programme of 1869 or an improved edition of it adapted to the present day. Our party has absolutely nothing to learn from the Lassalleans in the theoretical sphere” (see Engels’ letter to August Bebel of March 18-28, 1875; this volume, p. 67).

Marx and Engels saw the draft of the Gotha programme as an unacceptable ideological concession and surrender to Lassalleanism. They regarded as totally inadmissible the inclusion in the programme of the proposition that in relation to the working class all other classes were reactionary and of the “iron law of wages”, which was founded on false theoretical premisses (pp. 68-69). They also condemned the programme’s virtual rejection of “the principle that the workers’ movement is an international one” (p. 68), the brushing aside of the problem of the trade unions, and much else. They argued cogently that these propositions, by dragging the party backwards in the theoretical sphere, would do grave harm to the German workers’ movement. In his letter to Bebel, Engels stressed that “a new programme is after all a banner planted in public, and the outside world judges the party by it” (p. 72). The Gotha programme, he showed, was a step backwards in comparison with the Eisenach programme.

Critical analysis of the draft Gotha programme gave Marx a handle for expounding his views on the crucial theoretical questions of scientific socialism on the basis of his previous socio-economic research and, above all, on Capital The Critique of the Gotha Programme is mainly concerned with the Marxist theory of the state and socialist revolution. In contrast to the Gotha programme, in which the state was treated “as an independent entity” (p. 94), Marx revealed the class, exploitative nature of the bourgeois state. He also examined the role of the state after the victory of the socialist revolution and stressed that a relatively long period would inevitably be required to carry out the immense creative work of the revolutionary remoulding of society. “Between capitalist and communist society lies the period of the revolutionary transformation of the one into the other. Corresponding to this is also a political transition period in which the state can be nothing but the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat” (p. 95).

In his Critique of the Gotha Programme Marx elaborated new aspects of the theory of the future communist society as a social formation developing according to its objective laws. It was here that he first set forth the proposition on the two phases of communist society, the two stages of the great transformative process embracing the sphere of production and production relations, the distribution of material goods, people’s political and intellectual life, morality and the right. In the first phase, under socialism, we have to deal with a society “just as it emerges from capitalist society, which is thus in every respect, economically, morally and intellectually, still stamped with the birth-marks of the old society” (p. 85).

Marx criticised the Lassallean thesis of the programme that under socialism every worker would possess the total product of his labour, the “undiminished proceeds of labour” (p. 84). He pointed out that even after the abolition of private property in the means of production, before becoming available for individual consumption the total social product would have to reimburse the funds set aside for the replacement of the means of production, for its further expansion, and for public needs. The first phase of communism presupposes the equality of the members of society only in the sense of their equal relationship to the means of production that have become public property, their equal obligation to work, and their equal rights to various social goods and services. This form of distribution embodies the social justice of the socialist society: “The individual producer receives back from society—after the deductions have been made—exactly what he gives to it” (p. 86).

Only at the next stage, with its very high development of all the productive forces and of the productivity of social labour, would radical changes take place in people’s material standard of living, in their labour conditions and consciousness. Marx draws a picture of communist society in which the individual, freed of the struggle for his daily bread and fear of the future, will be able to realise all the abilities of his personality, its harmonious development, and be able to shed the possessive instincts and nationalist prejudices inbred by centuries. “Only then,” Marx wrote, “can the narrow horizon of bourgeois right be crossed in its entirety and society inscribe on its banners: From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs!” (p. 87).

The Critique of the Gotha Programme was aimed not only against Lassalleanism, against opportunist trends in the German workingclass movement, but also against vulgar socialism as a whole. It exposed its inherent basic methodological defect—failure to understand the determining role of social production, the desire to shift the centre of gravity, both in criticism of the existing society and in projects for social transformation, into the sphere of distribution. “The vulgar socialists ... have taken over from the bourgeois economists the consideration and treatment of distribution as independent of the mode of production and hence the presentation of socialism as turning principally on distribution” (p. 88).

The rapid growth of Social-Democracy’s influence in Germany, its sweeping advance among the mass of the German workers, and the successes of the Socialist Workers’ Party at the elections to the Reichstag (see pp. 250, 251), were a cause of grave concern to Bismarck. On October 19, 1878, using as a pretext two attempts on the life of William I, in which the Social-Democrats were in no way involved, the government passed a “Law against the Harmful and Dangerous Aspirations of Social-Democracy”, which remained in force right up to 1890. This so-called Exceptional Law Against the Socialists, better known as the Anti-Socialist Law, virtually proscribed the Socialist Workers’ Party of Germany.

In September 1878, even before the law was introduced, on the basis of the minutes of the Reichstag sitting at which the government Bill was debated, Marx outlined an exposé entitled “The Parliamentary Debate on the Anti-Socialist Law” in which he resolutely repudiates the reactionaries’ attempts to accuse revolutionary Social-Democracy of terrorism and identify it with the anarchistic elements; he unmasks the provocative police methods Bismarck’s government resorted to in the Reichstag to cast a veneer of legality over its actions. “Indeed,” Marx wrote, “the government is seeking to suppress by force a development it dislikes but cannot lawfully attack” (p. 249).

In this article Marx poses the question of the dialectical relationship between the peaceful and non-peaceful forms of the proletariat’s struggle. He emphasises that in countries where the conditions are favourable the working class can count on the peaceful acquisition of power. But even in this case it must be aware that this peaceful path may be blocked by forces “interested in restoring the former state of affairs” (p. 248). The choice of path, peaceful or non-peaceful, is determined not by the subjective desires of the movement’s leaders or their doctrines but by the line-up of class forces, the behaviour of the ruling class, the form in which it resists the maturing social changes. “An historical development,” Marx writes, “can remain ‘peaceful’ only for so long as its progress is not forcibly obstructed by those wielding social power at the time” (ibid.).

At a difficult time for the German Social-Democrats, Marx and Engels helped them to find new forms of activity, to evolve a correct tactical line. A special role was played by the “Circular Letter to August Bebel, Wilhelm Liebknecht, Wilhelm Bracke and others”, written by Marx and Engels in September 1879. This is one of the key documents of Marxism against opportunism in the working-class movement. Marx and Engels sharply criticised the opportunist programme of the party’s reformist wing (the so-called Manifesto of the Zurich Trio — Karl Höchberg, Eduard Bernstein and Karl Schramm). These are, the Circular Letter said, “the representatives of the petty bourgeoisie, terrified lest the proletariat, impelled by its revolutionary situation, should ‘go too far’. Instead of resolute political opposition—general conciliation; instead of a struggle against government and bourgeoisie—an attempt to win them over and talk them round; instead of defiant resistance to maltreatment from above—humble subjection and the admission that the punishment was deserved” (p. 267).

In a situation when Marxism had begun to spread widely in the mass working-class movement, its ideological opponents no longer dared openly to declare themselves its adversaries. Instead they tried to revise Marxism from within, by peddling an eclectic hotch-potch of vulgar materialist, idealistic and pseudo-socialist views as scientific socialism. The Circular Letter was designed to scotch this danger. It exposes the class and ideological roots of opportunism and proves the need to clear the ground of them. Marx and Engels noted that this phenomenon was due to the influence of the petty bourgeoisie on the proletariat, the penetration of non-proletarian ideology into the working-class movement. Repudiation of the class struggle against the bourgeoisie was being preached under the flag of Marxism. “On paper,” the Circular Letter stated, “it is recognised because there is no denying it any longer, but in practice it is glossed over, suppressed, emasculated” (p. 267). The authors of the letter urged the German SocialDemocrats to dissociate themselves from the “adulterating element” in the workers’ party (p. 269) and to strengthen its class character. “For almost 40 years,” Marx and Engels wrote, “we have emphasised that the class struggle is the immediate motive force of history and, in particular, that the class struggle between bourgeoisie and proletariat is the great lever of modern social revolution; hence we cannot possibly co-operate with men who seek to eliminate that class struggle from the movement” (p. 269).

As Marx and Engels stressed, with the Anti-Socialist Law in operation the position of the party organ became especially important. It should “crowd on sail” (p. 262), educating the proletarian masses in the spirit of revolutionary class struggle, defending the interests of the working class. The working-class party could play its vanguard role only if it clearly understood the revolutionary aims of the proletarian movement, and remained unshakeably loyal to them.

Under a regime of police terror the party must learn to combine legal and illegal forms of struggle, to use the parliamentary platform, to work out a consistently class-oriented stand for the Social-Democratic group in the Reichstag, and to maintain strict party discipline. Marx and Engels warned the party of the danger of the “parliamentary disease” (p. 261). Triumphs in parliamentary elections, as Engels wrote in his article “The Anti-Socialist Law in Germany.—The Situation in Russia”, had “made some people believe that it was no longer necessary to do anything else in order to obtain the final victory of the proletariat” (p. 251).

The articles Marx and Engels contributed to the workers’ press did much to spread the ideas of proletarian internationalism and the revolutionary theory of class struggle, and to strengthen the ideological platform of the Social-Democratic parties which were being set up. They also enhanced their prestige as the acknowledged leaders of the international working-class movement and strengthened their personal ties with the leaders of various parties. In these years, as Marx’s health declined, this journalistic work fell more and more on Engels.

Especially important were Engels’ contributions to the German workers’ newspapers, the organs of the German Social-Democratic Party, Der Volksstaat, Vorwärts, Die Neue Welt, and from 1881 to Der Sozialdemokrat, and others. Expressing a standpoint he shared with Marx, Engels actively opposed all attempts to identify Social-Democracy with the anarchist trends existing in one or another guise in the German and international working-class movement. Both men set out to explode the false thesis that the very doctrine of scientific socialism prompted people to commit excesses and terrorist acts and inclined them towards voluntarist decisions. In Refugee Literature, which opens the present volume, Engels made a detailed study of the programme drawn up by Blanquists forced to emigrate after the Commune. He took apart their thesis that a revolution could be made by an insignificant minority “according to a plan worked out in advance”, and that it could begin “at any time” (p. 14). Emphasising that one could not “play at revolution”, he countered the Blanquists’ misconceived thesis on the ruling out of compromises. Engels wrote with irony: “They imagine that, as soon as they have only the good will to jump over intermediate stations and compromises, everything is assured” (p. 17). In his own name and that of Marx he was equally firm in condemning the sectarian-anarchist trends that had emerged among the German Social-Democrats since the introduction of the Anti-Socialist Law, and that were most patently expressed in the statements of Johann Most and the London émigré paper, Freiheit, which Most had founded (pp. 478-79).

In his works “Semi-Official War-Cries”, Prussian Schnapps in the German Reichstag and “The Vicar of Bray”, Engels showed the reactionary aggressive character of Bismarck’s empire, the socioeconomic roots of the political influence wielded by the Prussian “Schnapps-Junkers” and Prussian militarism (see p. 124). Engels’ series of articles on Wilhelm Wolff, the closest friend and associate of Marx and Engels, Marx’s epilogue to the second edition of Revelations Concerning the Communist Trial in Cologne, and the speeches by Marx and Engels on February 7, 1876 at the German Workers’ Educational Society in London, acquainted the new generation of workers with the history and revolutionary traditions of Germany’s proletarian movement.

Besides the articles about Wilhelm Wolff, Engels’ essay The Mark, which showed the evolution of agrarian relations in Germany from the ancient community (the mark) up to the 1870s, was of great importance for determining the tactics of the Social-Democratic Workers’ Party with regard to the German peasantry. Engels here traced the main stages in the transformation of the peasants from free members of the communities into serfs, and exposed the true nature of the half-hearted reforms introduced in Germany in the first half of the nineteenth century (see pp. 454-55). He stressed that the small-scale peasant farming had become “a method of production more and more antiquated, less and less capable of yielding a livelihood” (p. 455). For the peasantry the future lay in reviving the mark, “not in its old, outdated form, but in a rejuvenated form”, that would enable the peasants to use the advantages of large-scale farming and modern machinery, but “without capitalists by the community itself” (p. 456). In this the peasants would find their natural allies in the workers and the proletarian party (ibid.).

Marx and Engels contributed to the French socialist newspaper, L’Égalité, founded in 1877 on the initiative of Jules Guesde. In March 1880 it printed two articles by Engels entitled “The Socialism of Mr. Bismarck”, attacking social demagoguery of the Bonapartist variety. With specific examples from Bismarck’s policies, Engels demonstrated the illusory nature of the ideas of state socialism current among some of the French socialists, their belief that the bourgeois state could carry through social reforms affecting the bedrock of bourgeois relations.

The theoretical section of the programme of the French Workers’ Party formulated by Marx at the request of the French socialists (“Preamble to the Programme of the French Workers’ Party”) was of particular significance. The party was founded in October 1879 at a constituent congress in Marseilles. This preamble, published not only in L’Egalité, but in a number of other papers, contained, as Marx put it in a letter to Friedrich Adolf Sorge on November 5, 1880, “a definition of the Communist aim” (see present edition, Vol. 46). The preamble regarded the emancipation of the proletariat as “that of all human beings without distinction of sex or race”. In setting the workers the task of taking over the means of production and bringing them into collective ownership Marx stressed that “this collective appropriation can only spring from the revolutionary action of the producing class—or proletariat—organised as an independent political party” (p. 340).

The development of theory in the French socialist movement was deeply influenced by a work written by Engels at the request of Paul Lafargue, Socialism: Utopian and Scientific, which Marx described as an “introduction to scientific socialism” (p. 339). First published in the French magazine La Revue socialiste, it was issued in the same year 1880 as a separate edition. Written with a notable clarity of style, this pamphlet, which Engels based on three chapters from Anti-Dühring, became available to a wide circle of working-class readers. In Engels’ lifetime the pamphlet appeared in authorised German and English editions, was translated into many other European languages and played an important part in propagating the ideas of Marxism throughout the international labour movement.

In this work Engels set out to arm the vanguard of the proletarian movement with an understanding of the relationship between Utopian and scientific socialism. This was a counterstroke to the attempts that were being made to obliterate the difference between them and to present Marx’s teaching as a variety of the socialist Utopias. Acknowledging the historical role of Utopian socialism, Engels treated it as one of the theoretical sources of Marxist theory. He gave a systematic account of the genesis of scientific socialism, which, as he pointed out, had emerged as a logical phenomenon, conditioned by the whole course of history. Called into being by the need to explain the proletariat’s revolutionary struggle, to build a scientific theory for the movement, Marxism was the result of a synthesis of the achievements of previous science and culture. “Like every new theory,” wrote Engels, “modern socialism had, at first, to connect itself with the intellectual stock-in-trade ready to its hand, however deeply its roots lay in the material economic facts” (p. 285).

From the overall achievements of Marxist thought Engels singled out two of Marx’s great discoveries, which played a decisive role in converting socialism from a Utopia into a science—the materialist conception of history, which reveals the laws of social development and proves the inevitability of the socialist revolution; and the theory of surplus value, which lays bare the essence of capitalist exploitation.

The emergence of Marxism, Engels noted, which had opened up a new stage in the history of human thought, also revolutionised socialist thinking. In contrast to the speculative constructs propounded by the Utopian socialists, scientific socialism based its conclusions on a profound theoretical analysis of reality, on getting to the bottom of social phenomena, on revealing the objective laws of social life. This was why scientific socialism could provide a genuine theoretical foundation for the workers’ revolutionary struggle, an ideological weapon for the socialist transformation of society. With its appearance on the scene, Engels wrote, this struggle was placed on a realistic basis. It was scientific socialism which had identified the historical mission of the proletariat as the force destined, in alliance with all the working people, to bring about the socialist revolution, and which had overcome the gap between socialist theory and the workingclass movement and armed the proletarian masses with a knowledge of the prospects of their struggle, with scientific forecast of the future society.

Developing the theory of socialist revolution, Engels made the point that the fundamental contradiction of capitalism—the contradiction between the social nature of production and the private character of appropriation—could be resolved only by a proletarian revolution. The proletariat, having taken power, would first of all turn the means of production into public property. Engels believed the organisation of socialist production on the basis of socialised property was the decisive condition for the building of the future society. Socialist society, he predicted, would be the first to be capable of regulating social production by conscious application of the objective laws of its development. The role of social consciousness would thus grow in importance. Society would be able to guide its economic activity according to plan and control the key social processes. “To accomplish this act of universal emancipation,” Engels wrote, “is the historical mission of the modern proletariat” (p. 325).

At the close of the 1870s symptoms of change began to appear in the British labour movement. The economic crisis of 1877-78 hit the great mass of the workers very hard and narrowed the economic ground for reformist illusions, thereby stimulating interest in social questions. Engels regarded this moment as favourable for a statement of his views in the British trade union newspaper, The Labour Standard, and between the beginning of May and the beginning of August 1881 he wrote a total of 11 articles for it. In them he expounded in popular form the main propositions of scientific socialism and Marxist political economy, explaining to British workers the mechanism of capitalist exploitation. Referring in the title of one of the articles to the popular trade union slogan “A Fair Day’s Wages for a Fair Day’s Work”, Engels proved that by its very nature capitalism ruled out fairness. He tried to emphasise the idea that the basic demand of the proletarian struggle should be the slogan: “Possession of the means of work—raw material, factories, machinery—by the working people themselves!” (p. 378).

In his articles for The Labour Standard Engels showed that the class struggle between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat was historically inevitable. It was bound to become a political struggle, the struggle for power (see p. 386). Engels gave theoretical substance to the significance of the workers’ economic struggle and showed the role of the trade unions as its organisers. At the same time he pointed out that their activities could not rid the worker of capitalist slavery (p. 385). For the proletariat to achieve success, he emphasised, the working class must be organised as a class, there must be an independent political party of the proletariat. Engels devoted a special article to this important question—”A Working Men’s Party”. “In England,” he wrote, “a real democratic party is impossible unless it be a working men’s party... No democratic party in England, as well as elsewhere, will be effectively successful unless it has a distinct working-class character” (pp. 405-06). The lack of an independent proletarian party, Engels noted, had left England’s working class content to form, as it were, “the tail of the ‘Great Liberal Party’ “ for nearly a quarter of a century (p. 404). These articles by Engels exerted a definite influence on the young generation in the British socialist movement. James Macdonald, later to be one of the representatives of the Marxist wing of the British socialists, said what really attracted him to socialism were Engels’ articles in The Labour Standard (How I Became a Socialist, London, [1896,] pp. 61-62).

Several articles written by Engels in 1877-78 for the Italian socialist paper La Plebe (“British Agricultural Labourers Want to Participate in the Political Life of Their Country”, “On the Socialist Movement in Germany, France, the United States and Russia”, and others) have been included in this volume. Here he told the Italian workers about the experience and successes of the proletariat’s struggle in various countries, wrote about the movement of the agricultural labourers in England, which at that time was of particular interest to the Italian socialists. Engels developed the idea of an alliance between the working class and the peasantry, and concentrated special attention on the importance of drawing the broad masses of the agricultural proletariat into the revolutionary struggle.

In the 1870s and early 1880s Marx and Engels kept a close watch on the economic and social development of the USA, noting the unprecedented concentration of capital, the growth of big companies controlling the activity of major branches of industry and trade and owning huge amounts of property in land, finance and the railways. In Engels’ articles “The French Commercial Treaty”, “American Food and the Land Question” and others, and also in the Preface that Marx and Engels wrote for the second Russian edition of the Manifesto of the Communist Party, the attention of European workers is focussed on Britain’s loss of its industrial monopoly and the inevitability of the United States’ predominance in the world market (see pp. 392-93). Marx and Engels analyse these processes from the standpoint of the prospects for the labour movement in Europe and the struggle waged by the American proletariat. For the American socialist weekly The Labor Standard Engels wrote a series of articles on the labour movement in Europe, entitled “The Workingmen of Europe in 1877”, in which he popularised the ideas of proletarian internationalism.

The interest Americans displayed in Marx as an individual and his ideas is illustrated by two documents included in the Appendices to this volume—the accounts of his interviews with a correspondent from The Chicago Tribune and with John Swinton, the editor of The Sun, an influential progressive bourgeois paper. These documents gave readers not only the main biographical facts about Marx and the history of the International, but also expounded his point of view on the problems of the labour movement in the USA. Rejecting the allegation that socialist ideas were “alien” to the United States, Marx stressed that “Socialism has sprung up in that country without the aid of foreigners, and was merely caused by the concentration of capital and the changed relations between the workmen and their employers” (p. 573). Developing ideas on the historically law-governed character and driving forces of revolution, Marx emphasised: “No revolution can be made by a party, but by a nation” (p. 576).

In these years Marx and Engels devoted much attention to the economic and social situation in Russia and the development of the Russian revolutionary movement. They studied the economy, agrarian system and social relations in Russia after the peasant reform of 1861 and read extensively Russian scientific literature and fiction. They were personally acquainted with many Russian revolutionaries, scientists and journalists. A prominent place was given to the study of Russian culture and language, which, in the words of Engels, is “a language that, both for its own sake, as one of the richest and most powerful living languages, and on account of the literature thereby made accessible, richly deserves study” (pp. 27-28). Marx and Engels valued Nikolai Chernyshevsky and Nikolai Dobrolyubov as profound revolutionary-democratic thinkers and writers. Engels called them “two socialist Lessings” (p. 23).

In a country where the working class had not yet become an organised force and was as yet incapable of leading a nation-wide struggle, the Russian revolutionary movement was represented by the Narodniks (Populists). While eager to help the Russian revolutionaries, Marx and Engels criticised their idealistic notions, their failure to grasp the link between legal, political institutions and the interests of definite classes of society. In the third and fourth articles of his series Refugee Literature, Engels took the side of one of the prominent ideologists of Narodism, Pyotr Lavrov, in his polemic with another Narodnik, Pyotr Tkachov, on the tasks of revolutionary propaganda in Russia. Engels resolutely objected to irresponsible “impetuous rodomontades” about an immediate uprising (p. 36) without taking into account the objective conditions and preliminary revolutionary propaganda, and to the voluntarist statements by Tkachov that “the revolutionary ... must assume the right to summon the people to revolt ... without waiting until the course of historical events announces the moment” (p. 35).

In the last article of his Refugee Literature (“On Social Relations in Russia”), and in a letter to the editors of Otechestvenniye Zapiski and in drafts of his reply to a letter from Vera Zasulich, Engels and Marx respectively made a profound analysis of the socioeconomic relations in Russia after the peasant reform of 1861. They regarded it as a milestone in the history of Russia, the beginning of a new stage in the country’s development (see p. 199, etc.). The abolition of serfdom in Russia in 1861 was connected with the mounting discontent of the peasants and the growth of peasant movement. Marx and Engels noted the decisive factors in the build-up of the revolutionary situation in Russia in the 1870s: the robbing of the peasantry as a result of the 1861 reform, the growth of the mass peasant movement and the protest of “the enlightened strata of the nation” (p. 50). Engels foresaw the revolutionary situation in Russia at the end of the 1870s and the beginning of the 1880s. Already in 1875 he had expressed the firm conviction that revolution in that country was “far closer than it would appear on the surface” (p. 11). Marx and Engels also hoped that the foreign-policy troubles the Tsarist government was experiencing in connection with the Russo-Turkish war of 1877-78 would precipitate revolutionary events in Russia.

Marx and Engels believed that the coming revolution in Russia should be a bourgeois-democratic, mostly peasant, revolution (see e.g. pp. 204-05). They saw that its prospects would be closely connected with the class struggle of the European proletariat. This revolution, Engels wrote in 1878, “means such a change in the whole situation of Europe as must be hailed with joy by the workingmen of every country as a giant step towards their common goal the universal emancipation of Labor” (p. 229; see also p. 426). Marx and Engels thought that a revolution in Russia would start a process “which, maybe after long and violent struggles, must ultimately and certainly lead to the establishment of a Russian Commune” (p. 372).

The question raised by Marx and Engels as to whether the non-capitalist development of Russia was possible, whether it would have to endure the torments of all the stages of economic evolution that the peoples of the industrially developed countries of Europe had endured before it, was of the greatest theoretical importance. Central to this question was the fate of the peasant commune. Marx and Engels showed that communal ownership of the land was not an exclusively Russian phenomenon, but one of the most ancient social institutions, an institution to be found “among all Indo-Germanic peoples ... from India to Ireland” (p. 46).

The commune could become “the fulcrum of social regeneration in Russia” only if it were ensured “the normal conditions of spontaneous development” (p. 371). Such conditions could be created only out of a successful democratic revolution in Russia, which would free it of exploitation “by trade, landed property and usury” and by “a new capitalist vermin” (pp. 354-55). In themselves neither the artel nor the commune could serve as a means of transition to socialism. This meant that the productive forces of society should be “developed so far that they permit the final destruction of class distinctions” (p. 39).

Only a revolution in Russia, Marx and Engels believed, and its support by the victorious working class of the developed capitalist countries (see p. 426) could offer the opportunity of reviving the archaic institution of the rural commune and remoulding it on socialist lines. Only such a revolution could open up for Russia the prospect of transition to socialism bypassing the stage of capitalist development. While acknowledging such a possibility, Marx and Engels made a sober assessment of the growth of the capitalist economy in Russia and its probable consequences. Marx stressed: “If Russia continues along the path it has followed since 1861, it will miss the finest chance that history has ever offered to a nation, only to undergo all the fatal vicissitudes of the capitalist system” (p. 199).

The Preface to the second Russian edition of the Manifesto of the Communist Party (1882), the translation of which was prepared by Georgi Plekhanov, provides a useful resume of the views of Marx and Engels on the development of the revolutionary movement in Russia. Whereas in 1848-49 the reactionary governments and the European bourgeoisie, they wrote, “found their only salvation from the proletariat ... in Russian intervention”, now the tsar is “a prisoner of war of the revolution”, and “Russia forms the vanguard of revolutionary action in Europe” (p. 426). They also clearly defined their point of view on the fate of the peasant community: “If the Russian Revolution becomes the signal for a proletarian revolution in the West, so that the two complement each other, the present Russian common ownership of land may serve as the starting point for communist development” (p. 426). This path for Russia did not come about in this way in the course of history. However, this definition suggests that Marx and Engels saw the theoretical possibility of non-capitalist path of development for industrially underdeveloped countries in the event of a victorious socialist revolution in countries with highly developed productive forces.

Marx and Engels consider the problems of the liberation of Poland and the involvement in the revolutionary movement of other oppressed nations of Europe, and also the revolutionary changes in Austria-Hungary, in direct connection with the tasks and prospects of the Russian revolution. In the first article of his Refugee Literature Engels repeats and develops the idea he had first expressed in 1847: “A people that oppresses others cannot emancipate itself” (p. 11). This work and also the speeches made by Marx and Engels at meetings in honour of the anniversaries of the Polish uprisings of 1830 and 1863, raised the question of the organic link between the struggle of the working class against the exploiting society and that of the oppressed peoples for their national liberation (see pp. 57-58). The liberation of the Polish people from social and national oppression was thus linked with the struggle of the Russian people to overthrow the tsarist autocracy.

The section “From the Preparatory Materials” contains two very important manuscripts written by Marx, unpublished in his or Engels’ lifetime. The first is his conspectus of Bakunin’s Statehood and Anarchy, which Marx compiled in 1874 and the beginning of 1875 and in which he summed up, as it were, the ideological struggle with Bakuninism in the First International. In contrast to Bakunin’s subjective and voluntarist arguments for the possibility of a social revolution at any time and in any place, Marx developed the proposition that “a radical social revolution is bound up with definite historical conditions of economic development” (p. 518). Showing the nonsensical character of Bakunin’s slogan on the immediate “abolition of the state”, Marx formulated the idea of the necessity of establishing the rule of the proletariat, the proletarian state, in which with the assumption of power the workers would have to suppress “the strata of the old world who are struggling against them” and keep power in their hands “as long as the economic basis of class society has not been destroyed” (p. 521). Here Marx states his views on the tactics of the proletarian party towards the peasantry. On coming to power the proletariat must “take the measures needed to enable the peasant to directly improve his condition, i.e. to win him over to the revolution; these measures, however, contain the seeds which will facilitate the transition from the private ownership of the land to collective ownership, so that the peasant arrives at this economically of his own accord” (p. 517). The important ideas expressed in this manuscript on the maturing of the social preconditions for the socialist revolution and the dictatorship of the proletariat, the alliance of the working class with the peasantry and the petty-bourgeois strata in general, and the dangers of anarchism and voluntarism in the work of social transformation, were reflected and developed by Marx and Engels in the Critique of the Gotha Programme, Refugee Literature, the drafts of the letter to Vera Zasulich and other works mentioned earlier.

The second manuscript is the “Marginal Notes on Adolph Wagner’s Lehrbuch der politischen Oekonomie”. Criticising the bourgeois economist Adolph Wagner, an “armchair socialist”, Marx explains and specifies certain key propositions of his own economic theory, its subject and method. He exposes the dishonest tricks used by bourgeois economists in their “criticism” of him, their idealist approach to the analysis of economic phenomena and interpretation of them as reflections of the evolution of legal standards. Replying to Wagner’s criticism of the theory of value in Capital, Marx stresses that for him the subject is not “value” and not “exchange value” but commodity (p. 544). Here he sets forth his method of analysing the commodity, the foundations of its “duality” determined by the dual character of labour embodied in it—its specific determinateness, on the one hand, and simply as the expenditure of human labour power, on the other. Marx also speaks of the historicism of his economic theory; in his analysis use-value “still only comes under consideration when such a consideration stems from the analysis with regard to economic formations, not from arguing hither and thither about the concepts or words ‘use-value’ and ‘value’ “ (p. 546). Marx thus emphasises that his investigation deals not with an abstract logical construction but with analysis of the existing economic reality.

The volume contains some vivid biographical material about Marx by Engels. These are “Karl Marx”, written in 1877 for the Volks-Kalender almanac, and also the obituary and funeral oration with which Engels marked the death of his friend on March 14, 1883 (“Draft of a Speech at the Graveside of Karl Marx”, “Karl Marx’s Funeral” and “On the Death of Karl Marx”). Engels provides a model analysis of Marx’s life and work. He saw Marx as a great scientist, who looked upon science “above all things as a grand historical lever, as a revolutionary power in the most eminent sense of the word” (p. 463). For Marx, according to Engels, theory was always inseparable from practice: “The struggle for the emancipation of the class of wages-labourers from the fetters of the present capitalist system of economic production,” Engels wrote, “was his real element” (p. 464). Engels also showed Marx’s role as organiser and leader of the class struggle of the proletariat, the true creator of the Communist League and the International Working Men’s Association. “An immeasurable loss has been sustained both by the militant proletariat of Europe and America,” Engels said at Marx’s funeral, “and by historical science, in the death of this man” (p. 467). Engels concluded his funeral oration with the prophetic words, “His name will endure through the ages, and so also will his work!” (p. 469).

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The volume contains 66 works by Marx and Engels, of which 28 appear in English for the first time, including Prussian Schnapps in the German Reichstag, Wilhelm Wolff, “The Anti-Socialist Law in Germany.—The Situation in Russia”, “The Socialism of Mr. Bismarck” by Engels, and the “Notes on Bakunin’s Book Statehood and Anarchy” by Marx. Among the materials published in the Appendices, four documents make their first appearance in English. The drafts of Marx’s letter to Vera Zasulich in the main section of the volume are printed for the first time in English in full, in strict accordance with the manuscript.

The volume is arranged in chronological order with the exception of Engels’ letter to August Bebel of March 18-28, 1875, which is traditionally placed together with the Critique of the Gotha Programme by Marx. Engels’ manuscripts On the Early History of the Germans and The Frankish Period, written during the period covered by Volume 24, are printed in Volume 26 of the present edition because these works are connected with Engels’ The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State.

In cases where works by Marx or Engels have survived in several languages, the English version—manuscript or printed—is reproduced in this volume. Significant differences in reading with versions in other languages are indicated in the footnotes.

All the texts have been translated from the German except where otherwise stated. Headings supplied by the editors where none existed in the original are given in square brackets. The asterisks indicate footnotes by the authors; the editors’ footnotes are indicated by index letters.

Misprints in proper and geographical names, figures, dates, and so on, have as a rule been corrected without comment by checking with the sources used by Marx and Engels. The known literary and documentary sources are referred to in footnotes and in the index of quoted and mentioned literature. Words written in English in the original are given in small caps; longer passages written in English in the original are placed in asterisks.

When working on this volume, the editors made use of the results of the scientific research done when preparing for print volumes 24 (Section I) and 25 (Section I) of Marx-Engels Gesamtausgabe (MEGA2), a new complete edition of the Works of Marx and Engels in the languages of the original.

The volume was compiled and the preface and notes written by Marina Doroshenko and Valentina Ostrikova (Institute of Marxism-Leninism of the CC CPSU). The materials of the volume covering the period from May 1874 to September 1878, as well as the drafts of Marx’s letter to Vera Zasulich and the manuscripts in the section “From the Preparatory Materials”, were prepared by Marina Doroshenko. The materials from September 1878 to May 1883 and the documents in the Appendices were prepared by Valentina Ostrikova.

The name index, the index of quoted and mentioned literature, the index of periodicals and the glossary of geographical names were prepared by Yelena Kofanova.

The entire volume was edited by Valentina Smirnova (Institute of Marxism-Leninism of the CC CPSU).

The translations were made by David Forgacs, Rodney and Krystyna Livingstone, Peter and Betty Ross, Barrie Selman, and Joan and Trevor Walmsley (Lawrence & Wishart) and edited by Nicolas Jacobs (Lawrence & Wishart), Jane Sayer, Stephen Smith, Lydia Belyakova, Anna Vladimirova and Yelena Vorotnikova (Progress Publishers), and Vladimir Mosolov, scientific editor (Institute of Marxism-Leninism of the CC CPSU).

The volume was prepared for the press by the editor Yelena Kalinina.